U2fags, defend this album. I'll wait

U2fags, defend this album. I'll wait.

u2 needs to retire

> It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything.

Savage

>go in expecting an album of Hendrix covers
>get Bono's sanctimonious pearls of wisdom over dotted eighth note delay

Even worse than the iphone scandal.

I just don't get why they are one of the biggest bands of all time, I've listened to The Joshua Tree and that was ok but not enough to make them as perennially big as they are - especially given all the stinkers they've released.

i mean, if pitchfork says it's bad then it's probably pretty good

I cannot. Nevertheless, its namesake is a 10/10.

damn, if you read the review, even 5.3 seems a little high. that last line is brutal.

so Sup Forums, whose in right?

Music is subjective

Even if they didn't like it, I did

holy woah... dude, ur like another kant

more like UPOO

>It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything.

This is literally the reason why Irony exists and why P4k lauds ironic artists.

U2 haven't been good since like 1993

Pitchfork rating a mainstream rock album low is like Rolling Stone rating a mainstream rock album high. It's exactly what you'd expect given their brands, and it says nothing about the album's quality.

Shut the fuck up gernog

U2 is by gernings for gernigs

No Line On The Horizon was the last great U2 album. Fight me.

Wow that's really made me depressed

> or the portmanteau punchline that ends “American Soul,” which is simply: “refujesus”?

I literally just non ironically shouted OH NOOOOOOOO

RIP U2

Surprised the score was so high since they pretty much shit all over the album and even implied that their earlier stuff was only okay at best.

But, yeah, the album is shit. Here's how I'd break down U2
>1976 - 1981: pretty good
>1982 - 1996: great
>1997 - 2002: significant step down, though sometimes still quite good, legacy slightly diminished despite ability to return to good commerical and critical graces
>2003 - 2014: freefall decline with "good to okay" material (usually with Eno of course) occasionally rearing its head though, legacy vanishing
>2015 - present: Absolutely abhorrent, their legacy is completely gone

I'm still outraged they somehow sneaked this in my iPod. Did any of you feel violated too?

do you feel proud of yourself for saying dumb shit

this has gotta be the gayest album cover ever made

>more like UPOO
>disses U2
>favorite band is Coldplay
>second favorite is Oasis
>third favorite is Radiohead
>loves Arcade Fire, R.E.M., Keane

You realize all those bands are highly influenced by and in many ways indebted to U2, right?
>

t. Some faggot "critic" who's never made a single song in his life

I think it's his son but yeah. Pretty gay and weird.

>has literally never seen their debut album

> Years in the making, U2’s 14th studio album finds the band straining to reassert its relevance in a world where rock music has long since ceded its vanguard status.

>In the late 1980s, en route to Memphis on the mission that would be dubiously immortalized by the documentary U2: Rattle and Hum, Bono hitched a ride with a stranger whose car stereo dashed his spirits. The young driver had been listening to Def Leppard’s Mutt Lange-produced glam-metal opus Hysteria—and it sounded magnificent. Bono was awed. When at last it dawned on the driver who exactly he’d picked up, he switched out the Def Leppard tape for some vintage U2. By comparison, it couldn’t help but sound dull.

>U2: Their art is fundamentally, inveterately emulous. The pursuit of relevance seems above all what motivates them to create. What are they doing, really, when time and again they endeavor to reinvent themselves, if not trying to remain fashionable—or, more precisely, to stave off obsolescence?

>In 1989, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. told Bono he worried the band was “turning into the world’s most expensive jukebox.” The band could not abide it. “They became so bored playing U2’s greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward,” Bill Flanagan writes in his biography U2 at the End of the World. “It didn’t seem to make any difference.”

>[Songs of Innocence] is brazen attempts to capture the zeitgeist, even by U2’s standards. Their combined effect is dire: Songs of Experience is the shameless effort of four men in their late 50s to muster a contemporary, youthful sound.

Are you referring to Songs of Innocence?


Because I might agree

not nearly as gay

>Of course, the band’s aspirations toward relevance are tempered by a competing pursuit: Here they strive, as usual, to guarantee longevity. They want to seem in touch; they also want to canonize another classic. This, one presumes, accounts for the inclusion of more familiar-sounding U2 barn-burners such as “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in its Way,” which sounds almost exactly like one expects a U2 song with that title would, and lead single “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” which has already failed to take hold of the popular imagination.

>“Red Flag Day” and “The Showman (Little More Better)” will fall rather short of eternal. “How long must we sing this song?” Bono asked on “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—and they’ve been obliged to sing it nightly since 1983. With these songs, about a single tour should do.

>Despite the millionth blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help but sound the same - as usual.

>It is tempting to praise Songs of Experience on the basis of its mawkish wholeheartedness. It does indeed seem like the product of considerable toil: This thing has been in progress for something like three years now, and between its revisions, reconstructions, and post-election rewritings. But it’s precisely this manifest ambition that makes Songs of Experience dispiriting. The music itself isn’t any better merely because this time around the band actually cares; all the industrious fervor amounts to meager flailing. It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything.


WEW LAD

i thought he was referring to blake's work

It's what got them their gay audience

U2 lost their gay audience though after they stopped being a niche little new wavey post-punk band playing gigs in suits and tight pants in nightclubs and became a bunch of white flag waving alt rockers who would become rock superstars via Eno.

better than having made this atrocious album

Why U2? How did these four Irishmen become the blueprint for every band with stadium aspirations? Perhaps above all else, the band's restlessness and willingness to challenge both themselves and their patrons is why the Killers, Kanye West, and Coldplay want to be the next U2 and not the next AC/DC. It's why these four Irishmen still represent the punk spirit decades after they emerged from it in the mid-1970s.

>After gigging around in pubs around the country for several years and recording demos with the little studio time they could find in Dublin, they were finally signed to CBS Records in '78 for one single-one EP deal in '79 and early '80. This launched them into the hands of Joy Division producer Martin Hannett, where they would bear witness to the recording of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" which Hannett worked on simultaneously with U2's first single for Island Records. Their sound would then be helmed by Siouxsie and the Banshees/Psychedelic Furs/Peter Gabriel wunderkind Steve Lillywhite, who brought his innovative recording techniques to the band's debut studio album, Boy, later that year.

>From 1980 to 2000, it was difficult to tell exactly what the next U2 album would sound like. Briefly: They added atmosphere to new wave, looked for God and found hits, exhumed their rock'n'roll heroes, sent-up those same heroes while losing their religion, and punctured pop via mutated techno.

>Each move was more audacious than the last-- even 1997 knee-jerk victim Pop saw the world-beating act taking completely unnecessary musical and financial risks in the name of Warholian post-modern pastiche. They then also managed to surprise on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind by successfully returning to form after shrugging off the notion for so many years.

goddamn larry looks like he's being drained by the succubus

My grandpa loves u2 and buys all their albums but he didn't buy this one because of the cover lol. He'll probably by the latest one though.

lol wtf is this shit

what the actual fuck are you going on about

this

it's not as good or original as NLOTH or SOI but still good album

t. Bono

Pop is good beside the rush in launch, only U2 bad albums are ATYCLB and HTDAAB.

No need, brian eno + u2 is always great.

No, I have an Android.

Bought the album (physical copy) on Friday.
Spent all weekend listening to it.

Its very accomplished and very mature. Its much slower in Tempo with the exception of The Blackout which is probably the only "anthem" on the whole album.

90% of the album is Bono writing about his health scare in the last year and and makes for some interesting lyrics.

Most of the complaints from people stem that "U2 are no longer relevant". Its a bizarre argument, because music has never been less relevant as a whole in 2017.

U2 excel where most bands fail, writing, and performing.

Visually, there are few bands (if any) in the world who can surpass the financial clout they put into their shows. The 360 tour was a financial KO to the music word, and I doubt anybody will topple U2s ability to pull in that much cash. That entire tour was a visual masterpiece with a unique stage and the IE tour was much of the same again.

Not that many people can afford to go to concerts these days, but if you get the chance, id recommend seeing a U2 show. They are genuinely stunning to see live.

it's one pip less classic than songs of innocent, kind of a part 2

>he uses Pitchfork score as an argument
Come on

I actually kind of liked a few tracks on songs of Innocence.